Some Notes on God

1. Is God vulnerable?

Apparently. To feel is to be vulnerable, is it not? To suffer?

The
noise of humanity irritated the Mesopotamian gods so miserably that
they wiped it out with a flood, the one on which the Genesis version is
based. Then they ran to their father Anu to shelter them from it.
Fraidy-cats. Then they suffered remorse for having caused it. They
felt it all.

Isis was vulnerable to love and loss, and her
brother-husband Osiris to deception, to assassination and—if you consider it a vulnerability—to rebirth.

The Nordic gods were subject to the same things, and of course to twilight.

The
Judaeo-Christian-Muslim God was notoriously jealous, and with some
reason: scholars are telling us all those names of his were actually of
other gods, lots of them. He suffered anger, rage, vengefulness and, we
can only conclude, a sense of obligation to put on our own vulnerability,
sweat blood in terror and submit to torture from which death could only
be a relief. It’s a beautiful story, “The notion,” as T.S. Eliot says,
“of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing.”

If only
it weren’t so mixed up with hellfire and sexual prohibition. “As the
caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,” says William
Blake, “so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.” Hence the
hypocrisy of the diaper: the Romans didn’t nail anybody up in his
underwear. Even Salvador Dalí paints it on. Only Michelangelo gives us
a nude Christ.

It
is debated whether Jesus spoke and read Greek, which had been the
lingua franca of the Eastern Empire since Alexander; moreover, the flight into
Egypt must have brought the Holy Family to the Jewish community in
Alexandria, the world’s intellectual capital, and the logical place for
Jesus to pick up enough to wow the Temple priests with at the age of
twelve—not that logic has to be involved. Certainly he talks more like
Socrates than like Moses.

And like Socrates, he may just be a
character in a book. The four most important people in Western
culture—Homer (for Alexander wanted to be Achilles, and Caesar wanted to
be Alexander), Socrates, Jesus and Shakespeare—may never have existed.

"Homer"May be as misnomerFor several otherwise out-of-work guysHalf his size.

Dalí
once remarked that he adored weakness, which he found consonant with
modern physics, and that he painted anti-matter angels. Perhaps we
could imagine an anti-matter God, who submits himself to his cosmos like
any artist to his work, and then what happens happens. The price for
freedom, after all, is vulnerability.

But let’s not get carried away. Ignorance—and here’s an adage I can sign—is bliss. Who knows
what's behind the curtain? On Isis’s statue the inscription said, "I
am all that was, is and will be, and no mortal has yet lifted my veil."

2) Is God evil?

There’s a case for it.
The shadow side of our culture is Gnosticism, the belief that we
ourselves are sparks of the original God, held prisoner here by a
second-rate god, a Demiurge, psychotic and inferior, who split off from
Godhead and trapped us here. Vulnerability again: apparently it’s
eternal.

When you get the gnosis, the knowledge, from a redeemer or just by waking up, you can never lose the sense that you are God, and the sky-god isn’t.

It’s
been with us since the first century, the idea that the Demiurge put us
in a garden and told us we could do anything we wanted except eat the
fruit of a certain tree. Well, what else could we do? Then he came
looking for us—very creepy: “Who told you you were naked?” In this
version the serpent is the redeemer, the ancient symbol of wisdom.

Then
"God" wiped us out with a flood, after which he promised he wouldn’t do
that any more; next time he’d do it by fire. Thanks a lot. (Which Planet of the Apes movie is it where the people worship an atom bomb as a manifestation of God? What James Baldwin called The Fire Next Time.)

But
there are lots of versions. The texts were suppressed, and until
recently the only source we had on them was the Church Fathers, who
summarized them to condemn them. The thing went underground and spread
to Islam, where the Sufis adopted it, and were horribly beaten down.
The great Persian poet Rumi was a Gnostic.

In
the middle ages Gnosticism emerged in Kabbalah. And from Islam it
came, through both the Muslim-occupied Balkans and Muslim-occupied
Spain, to northern Italy and the south of France. There it appeared as
Catharism ("Purism"): the Cathars were vegetarians, egalitarians,
feminists—the whole trip—and embodied a heresy so threatening that the
Pope sent a crusade against them.

The
leader of the crusade, Simon de Montfort (I’m quoting the Wikipedia)
“ordered his troops to gouge out the eyes of 100 prisoners, cut off
their noses and lips, then send them back to the towers led by a
prisoner with one remaining eye.” It didn’t work, so they slaughtered them and burned down their
cities. The Cistercian abbot who led the attack on Béziers was asked how
to distinguish Cathars from Christians. "Kill them all," he said. "God
will know his own."

Courtly love
comes down to us from poems written at that time, and in that place, and
imitated ever since. We’re still in the habit of letting ladies go
first, though we no longer hold their chairs while they sit or take our
hats off in their presence, possibly because we’re not wearing hats.

And
though the exaltation of women was a civilizing force in those barbaric
times, it’s no exaggeration to say that the women’s revolution has been
against courtly love.

The
schism between the Orthodox east and the Catholic west happened before
these events, so courtly love never took hold in Greece. Here in
anarchic Athens, where people park their cars on the sidewalk and
there’s often room for only one person to pass at a time, women smile at
me when I step back for them (I can’t help it): it tells them I'm from
the West, and Greeks love foreigners.

But here’s the thing: many
people believe that courtly-love literature was not about lovers and
their high unattainable ladies, but code for the poet yearning for his
high unattainable self, his godhead. Saying it in code is better than
having your eyes gouged out.

Notice that the lover never
“attains” his beloved—that’s one of the rules. In the north of France,
where it took the form of romance, Tristan and Isolde don’t have sex;
they sleep with a sword between them: their job is to yearn. And it’s
that way down to Wagner, down to pop songs.

Dante seems to have
sensed the spiritual meaning. His sonnets to Beatrice are the strongest
courtly-love poems I know; and it’s she who, in the Commedia, leads him up to the light.

God as gay

In Paradise Lost Milton, who knew the ancient languages—and the Fathers by heart—puts
the Gnostic arguments in Satan’s mouth. Milton, as Blake says, “was a
true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” It’s Milton’s
Satan who inspires English Romanticism. In Byron’s Cain, Cain is
a hero who defies the illegitimate God and commits murder, fuck you.
Shelley despises the world he finds himself in, and even sweet
Wordsworth adapts Satan’s speeches to his own sense of self.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.

Well,
that’s the sweet way of saying it. You get your sweet Gnostics, like
Emerson, and you get your bitter Gnostics, like Samuel Beckett, who
thinks even after we die the torture continues. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is not just the black guy in white society; he's the unseen self.

Blake
wondered what kind of God could make the tiger: “Did he who made the
lamb make thee?” (I have lambs and tigers in my own heart, it doesn’t
seem that remarkable.) Queegueg says the same thing in Moby-Dick which, along with Peter Pan and Under the Volcano,
is the great Gnostic novel: when a shark he thought dead snaps
at him he says, “Queequeg no care what god made him shark, wedder Feejee
God or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam
Ingin.” And we get it again with the enormous fat crocodile in Terrence
Malick’s The Thin Red Line: who made that thing?

Ingmar Bergman gave us a vision of God as a rapacious spider, and Stanley Kubrick had the Gnostic paranoia (see Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick).
David Lynch combines that with Presbyterianism, an easy fit:
Romanticism is not only Gnosticism, it's post-Christian Presbyterianism;
that is to say it's dualistic—it rejects the world. (For more on dualism, see Greece versus the Puritans.)

"That is God...a shout in the street."

Classicists
like Joyce and Dalí don't care for that. In 1943 Dalí wrote, “Hitler
wants war, not in order to win, as most people think, but to lose. He
is romantic, and an integral masochist, and exactly as in Wagner’s
operas it has to end for him, the hero, as tragically as possible. The
end to which Hitler aspires is to feel his enemy’s boot crushing his
face, which for that matter is unmistakably marked by disaster.”

I wonder what he'd say about Merkel.

Nevertheless our own time is heavy with Gnostics. In Peter Weir’s Fearless Jeff Bridges looks up at the sky and says, “You want to kill me, but you can’t.” In Weir's Dead Poets Society
those boys who stand up on their desks at the end are assuming their
full stature by defying the Demiurge—who is really rather a nice guy,
isn’t he? And in his The Truman Show the Demiurge is a reality-TV producer who keeps Truman in a false world.

For the young, of course, there’s The Matrix: God as computer.

The
discovery of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi in 1945 had something
to do with this mood: for the first time we had the real texts, and a
different kind of Jesus, a stay-light-on-your-feet Jesus. The Copts are the ancient guardians of this tradition.

But
it's always with us, texts or no. In its debased form it’s the content
of all those Twitter messages, LinkedIn messages, inspiration messages,
you-can-do-it messages. Here’s a profile I just saw: “Beyond Your Fear
Is A Whole New You! We all have fear about something in our lives.
Whether it is rejection, loss, failure or a number of any other emotions
that are like anchors dragging behind us and holding us back from doing
what....” There are more redeemers out there than people who give a
rat’s ass.

But that’s the way we see things these days. Emersonianism is America. “Yes we can!” Harold Bloom says most Americans are Gnostics without knowing it.

But what a paranoid vision! And it’s a dogma! I hate
dogma. There’s a difference, after all, between belief and faith.

Nor
can I square it with my enjoyment of the world; Gnosticism is scarcely
what you’d call earthy. Mine is a precarious position, yes, but as my alter ego says in The Cad, "if you're not making a fool of yourself, you're not alive." We speak from experience there, Toby and I.

And who says it has to be squared? "Commonsense is square," said Vladimir Nabokov, "whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round."

Socrates, whether he existed or not, said "The best theory of the gods is no theory at all."

12 comments:

Interesting. Fun. But: not all Gnostics believe in the demiurge – and you forgot to mention Sophia. Also, Gnosticism was the basis of the Islamic Sufi tradition. After reading Rumi, try St John of the Cross. Aside from the homoerotic poetry (which the Vatican still insists is purely allegorical; or a mistranslation; or both) the metaphysics are Gnostic, not Western Christianity.

Maslow's needs. People with resources don't worry about paying the rent, either - and have trouble connecting with what financial duress really feels like.

They GET more stuff for the social positioning it gives them. We don't tend to think of it this way, but there's a genetic rationale for that. Mates with physical fitness (looks), social position (dominance) and resource access (wealth) will produce stronger offspring that will have a greater chance of success going forward.

The more social we become, the more sense it makes to download responsibility, specialize and collaborate, etc, so that we can worry less about the fundamentals. When genetically it's all about individual superiority, though, what motivates socialization? There's a genetic answer for that, too. It's about neurochemistry. Worth noting, there's a correlation between religion and the development of civilization and between mental health (think maniacs who talk a lot to strangers) and ecstatic religious states. The question gets asked, who did people with bipolar disorder think they were before Jesus?

Consider this - God is two things; one, existence (we're all part of the same ecosystem - if God is everything, we're God too) and two, a pro-social state of mind. A state of mind that drives us to love our neighbours and collaborate to increasing degrees, creating a social organism that's more than the sum of its parts.

This dichotomy between limbic reactiveness and pre-frontal consciousness, then, could be the sleep/awake methaphor that repeats itself through time and across cultures.

I follow a very basic thinking about GOD & that is - during their times, all GODs were Human beings. Was Christ not a human being and then due to his sacrifice and dedication to humanity and suffering, all other human beings of the time gave Christ a place where everyone worships him.

Likewise even in Hindu Mythology, all the Gods worshiped by generations, were human beings and got the place of worship due to the struggle, life pattern and dedication to the community that they were termed as GOD.

However balance approach could be GOD exists in every one and its more of a Behavior, approach & attitude and not the Material benefits or belongings or liabilities which decide the status.

We should believe that element of GOD (Good) does exist in everyone. Its only the circumstances which make people behave in a particular manner, which again is termed as GOOD or BAD by all of us.

This is my take and understanding about the GOD. I do categories the Natural SUPER POWERES such as Sun, Moon, Earth, Sky, Water and Air as something very different, which is not created by anyone. They are all the forms of SUPER POWERS, ruling our lives.

It's easy to get lost in questions of the ethereal and they can be quite fascinating, but like you said, Bob, "...don’t think about that now, you’ve got the rent to pay." If we don't keep our feet on the ground then fantasy will mislead us! Great article!